_From me to thee glad serenades,
Dances for thee, I propose, saluting thee, adornments and feastings for
thee;
And the sights of the open landscape and the high-spread sky are fitting,
And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night--_
_The night in silence under many a star,
The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know,
And the soul turning to thee, O vast and well-veiled death,
And the body gratefully nestling close to thee_.
_Over the tree-tops I float thee a song,
Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the
prairies wide,
Over the dense-packed cities all and the teeming wharves and ways,
I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee, O death_.
15.
To the tally of my soul,
Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird,
With pure deliberate notes spreading, filling the night,
Loud in the pines and cedars dim.
Clear in the freshness moist and the swamp-perfume,
And I with my comrades there in the night.
While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed,
As to long panoramas of visions.
And I saw askant the armies,
I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,
Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierced with missiles I saw
them,
And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody.
And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs (and all in silence),
And the staffs all splintered and broken.
I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them;
I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war,
But I saw they were not as was thought,
They themselves were fully at rest, they suffered not:
The living remained and suffered, the mother suffered,
And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffered,
And the armies that remained suffered.
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